Lecture 6 Language Contact and Linguistic Variation: Style, Social Class, Sex, Gender, Ethnicity

1. Language and Social Class

2. Style

3. Style as the SecondMain Dimension of Linguistic Variation

4. Function versus Structure

5. Overview of Approaches to Style

6. Language and Gender / Sex

6.1 Language and Social Class

It has been known for some time that differences in language are tided to social class. In the 1950s it was suggested that certain lexical and phonological differences in English could be classified as U (upper class) or non-U (lower class), e.g. serviette versus table-napkin, to takewhatwas then one of the best-known of all linguistic class-indicators of England [16, p. 67]. Previously most studies of variability were

concerned with regional variation or dialectology. From the 1960s onwards linguists have turned their attention to the language of cities,where an increasing proportion of theworld’s population lives inmodern times.Urbanization tends to promote linguistic diversity as well as uniformity [ibid., p. 68]. Towns have typically attracted migrants

frommany rural areas,who speak different languages and regional dialects.

London, for instance, provided a point of origin for the diffusion of Standard English, but now it has become an increasingly diverse city through the influx of overseasmigrants fromthe Caribbean andAsia.Asmany as fifty different languagesmay be spoken in parts of the city. Similarly,Melbourne, once primarily a monolingual town, now has the largest concentration of Greek speakers in the world. In urban centers languages of wider communication and standard languages serve to unify a diverse population. Furthermore, the rise of urbanization is connectedwith an increase in social stratificationwhich is reflected in linguistic variation.

A study conducted in New York City in the 1960s was the first to introduce a systematicmethodology for investigating social dialects and the first large-scale linguistic survey of an urban community [9; 10].

Unlike previous dialectological studies,which generally chose one person as representative of a particular area, this survey was based on taperecorded interviewswith 103 informantswho had been chosen by random sample as being representative of the various social classes, ages, ethnic groups, etc. to be found in New York City. This approach solved the problem of how anyone person’s speech could be thought of as representing a large urban area.

Early investigations had concluded that the speech of New Yorkers appeared to vary in a random and unpredictable manner. Sometimes they pronounced the names Ian and Ann alike and sometimes they pronounced post-vocalic /r/ (i.e. r following a vowel) in words such as car, while at other times they did not.This fluctuationwas termed free variation because there did not seem to be any explanation for it [16, p. 68]. The NewYork study and subsequent ones modelled after it, however, showed that when against the background of the community as a whole, it was not free, but

rather conditioned by social factors such as social class, age, sex, and style in predictable ways. Thus, while idiolects (or the speech of individuals) considered in isolation might seem random, the speech community as a whole behaved regularly. Using these methods, one could predict that a person of a particular social class, age, sex, etc. would not pronounce postvocalic /r/ a certain percentage of the time in certain situations.Through the introduction of these newmethods for investigating social dialects by correlating sociolinguistic variableswith social factors, linguists have been able to build up a comprehensive picture of social dialect differentiation in

the United States and Britain in particular, and other places, where these studies have since been replicated.

In order to demonstrate a regular relationship between social and linguistic factors, one has to be able to measure them in a reliable way.

The principal social dimensions linguists have been concerned with are: social class, age, sex, and style. Of these, social class has been the most researched.Many linguistic studies have started by grouping individuals into social classes on the basis of factors such as education, occupation, income, etc., and then looked to see how certain linguistic features were used by each group [3 – 5; 9; 10]. The method used in NewYork City to study the linguistic features was to select items which could be easily quantified, in particular, phonological variables such as postvocalic /r/, which was either present or absent. This was one of the first features to be studied in detail by linguists. Varieties of English can be divided into two groups with respect to their treatment of this variable: those that are r-pronouncing (rhotic) and those that are not r-pronouncing (non-rhotic) [9; 10]. Today in Britain accents that have lost post-vocalic /r/ as a result of linguistic change generally havemore prestige than those, like Scottish English, that preserve it. In many parts of the United States the reverse is true, although this has not always been the case. Table 6.1 (a) compares the pronunciation of post-vocalic /r/ inNewYorkCitywith that of Reading, England. The results show that in New York City the lower one’s social status, as measured in terms of factors such as occupation, education, and income, the fewer post-vocalic /r/s one uses, while in Reading the reverse is true.

vocalic /r/ shows a geographically as well as a socially significant distribution. This difference among dialects of English is the result of a linguistic change involving the loss of /r/ preceding a consonant, but not a vowel, which began centuries ago in south-east England and spread north and west. The distribution of post-vocalic /r/ in the United States reflects the history of settlement patterns of colonists from different

parts of Britain and Ireland [16, p. 70]. Because the relevant linguistic factor for this change was the presence or absence of a consonant in the immediately following word (cf. e.g. car engine versus car key), a so-called linking/r appears in non-rhotic accents beforewords beginning with a vowel. Subsequently, this pattern seems to have been restructured and generalized so that /r/ is inserted in many contexts before a vowel where historically it was never present, e.g the idea of it becomes the idear of it and Shah of Iran becomes Shar of Iran. This phenomenon is known as intrusive r.

Just as the diffusion of linguistic featuresmay be halted by natural geographical barriers, itmay also be impeded by social class stratification. Similarly, the boundaries between social dialects tend for the most part not to be absolute. The pattern of variation for post-vocalic /r/ shows fine stratification or continuous variation along a linguistic dimension (in this case a phonetic one) as well as an extralinguistic one (in this case social class). The indices go up or down in relation to social class, and there are no sharp breaks between groups.Amajor finding of urban

linguistic work is that differences among social dialects are quantitative and not qualitative.

There are many other variables in English which show similar linguistically significant distributions, such as those studied inNorwich in the 1970s in an urban dialect studymodelled after theNewYork research [18; 19]. Three consonantal variables which varied with social class were investigated. Table 6.1 (b) shows the results for (ing), (t), and (h).

The numbers show the percentage of non-RP (Received Pronunciation) forms used by different class groups. The variable (ing) refers to alternation between alveolar /n/ and a velar nasal /ng/ in words with –ing endings such as reading, singing, etc. These are technical phonetic labelswhich describe the variation between forms which are pronounced with the final ‘g’ sounded, and those which are pronounced as if they

were written readin’, singin’, etc. Speakers who use the latter forms are popularly said to be dropping their g’s. This variation is a wellknown marker of social status (and style) over most of the English speaking world. Table 6.1 (b) shows that the lower a person’s social status, the more likely he / she is to use a higher percentage of alveolar rather than velar nasal endings.

The variable (h) refers to alternation between /h/ and lack of /h/ in words beginning with /h/, such as heart, hand, etc. Unlike RP, most urban accents in England do not have initial /h/ or are variable in their usage of it. For these speakers who drop their h’s, art and heart are pronounced the same. Again, the lower a person’s social status, the more likely he/she is to drop h’s. Speakers in the north ofEngland, Scotland, and Ireland retain /h/, as do speakers of American English. The variable (t) refers to the use of glottal stops instead of /t/, as in words such as bottle, which are sometimes stereotypically spelled as bot’le to represent the glottalized pronunciation of the medial /t/. Most speakers of English glottalize final /t/ in words such as pat, and no social significance is attached to it. In many urban dialects of British English, however, glottal stops are more widely used, particularly by younger working-class speakers in London, Glasgow, etc.

By comparing the results for the use of glottal stops in Norwich with those for (ing) and (h), some interesting conclusions can be drawn about the way language and social class are related in this English city.

Looking first at frequency, even the middle class in Norwich use glottal stops very frequently, i.e. almost 50 per cent of the time, but this isn’t true of (h). There is of course no reason to assume that every instance of variation in language will correlate with social structure in the same way or to the same extent. Most sociolinguistic variables have a complicated history. Some variables will serve to stratify the population more finely than others; and some cases of variation do not seem to correlate with any external variables, e.g. the variation in pronunciation of the first vowel of economic is probably one such instance. Some people pronounce this vowel like the vowel in bee and others like the vowel in bed. Phonological variables tend to show fine stratification and there is more socially significant variation in the pronunciation of English vowels than in consonants. In the case of glottal stop usage, what is socially significant is how frequently a person uses glottal stops in particular

linguistic and social contexts.The use of glottal stops is socially stigmatized particularly inmedial position, e.g. bottle, butter.Ahierarchy of linguistic environments can be set up which seems to apply to all speakers. The likelihood of occurrence of glottal stops varies according to the following environments:

most frequent word-final + consonant e.g. that cat

before syllabic nasal e.g. button

word-final + vowel e.g. that apple

before syllabic /1/ e.g. bottle

least frequent word-medially e.g. butter

Although all speakers are affected by the same internal constraints in the same way, they apply at different frequency levels, depending on social class membership and other external factors [16, p. 72 – 73].

The view of language which emerges from the linguistic study of urban dialects is that of a structured but variable system, whose use is conditioned by both internal and external factors. The use of other variables, however, can be more sharply stratifying socially. That is, a large social barrier between the middle class and the working class may be reflected in the usage of some linguistic feature. InEnglish such features aremore likely to be grammatical or syntactic, such as the use ofmultiple negation (e.g. ‘I don’t want no trouble’), than pronunciation variables [ibid., p. 73].

There is a close relationship between regional and social dialect in both the United States and Britain. More specifically, it appears that working-class varieties aremore localized.This is especially true inBritain, where those who are at the top of the social scale speak RP (Received Pronunciation), an accent which does not betray the local origin of the speaker, only his / her social status [ibid., p. 74].There is nothing like RP

in the United States, where regional standards exist in different parts of the country. It is quite possible for highly educated speakers to have marked local accents, as can be seen, for instance, in the fact that former President John F. Kennedy spoke with a recognizable east-coast New England variety, and President JimmyCarter with a non-coastal Southern one. Of course, educated speakers in both countries would tend not to use non-standard grammatical features.

The nature of the relationship between social and regional varieties needs further investigation since it is likely that it varies considerably in non-Western societies,where differences in social statusmay be organized quite differently. For instance, in Indiawemight expect sharp stratification of linguistic features to correlate with caste differences since the castes There is littlemobility becausemembership in a particular caste group is hereditary.